Posts Tagged ‘Food with Integrity’

Chipotle’s recent marketing stunt is so bold—so weirdly bold—I almost want to respect the depth of their gall. Although the company has been under fire for claiming that it serves “food with integrity” when in fact it serves loads of factory farmed meat, it has reacted to the negative publicity by promoting Niman Ranch’s pig guy and Chipotle supplier, Paul Willis, as a man whose understanding of porcine welfare comes from “communicating with them telepathically.”

No joke here.

Or is it a joke? I honestly don’t know. Wayne Hsiung, of Direct Action Everywhere—the organization that has led a brilliant series of protests against Chipotle—wrote the following earlier in the week: “You know a company has gone off the rails when it starts talking about telepathy with its victims. But I suppose when your entire business model is founded on a fraud, there’s not much else you can do.” Or could it be that the company is owning its fraudulence, internalizing its own lies, throwing residual caution to the wind, and saying “what the f***”? Let’s have some fun!” Lord knows their CEOs, who earned $25 million a piece last year, are laughing to the bank.

Joke or no joke, there’s something deeply insulting in the telepathy comment. It’s in the worst possible taste to claim empathy for animals that you purposely kill in order to make burritos. Does Paul Willis commune with the pigs when they are being shunted into the slaughter chute? I doubt it. Hell, even home slaughterers have the decency to do their handiwork under the guise of ersatz gravitas.

I’ve spoken to Willis in the past and he does not strike me as the kind of person to say such a thing. Did Chipotle put these words in his mouth? Who knows? Anyway, if there’s any good news in this stunt it’s that its absurdity suggests desperation. Chipotle is high on its own fumes. But the party will come to an end.

And they’re right. It is one of the harder realities to accept for those who want to believe that Chipotle is a fast food restaurant aiming to change the food system for the better. Fact is, nothing could be further from the truth. It merely taps popular discontent with conventional fast food to profitably purvey a greenwashed and “humane” version of slaughter. Additional anger might derive from the recent news that the company’s two founders raked in $50 million last year. Blood money indeed. (See my previous work on Chipotle here.)

Direct Action Everywhere is drawing attention to the abuses hidden by Chipotle’s savvy advertising campaigns and shamelessly misleading “Food with Integrity” gambit. It writes, “while its corporate propaganda has succeeded in making it one of the most successful businesses in the world, it has also left it vulnerable – particularly when even meat industry publications have noted that the company purchases meat from the same concentrated animal feedlot operations (so-called “factory farms”) as other buyers.”

To make these claims stick DxE participants have gathered in 37 cities and 13 countries under the banner of “It’s not food, it’s violence” and staged peaceful flash-mob protests at Chipotle stores, in some cases causing early closures with their civil disobedience.

I spoke to lead DxE organizer Wayne Hsiung several weeks ago. The impression I got was that Hsuing, a recovering law professor who has studied at MIT and the University of Chicago, had mastered the art of being everywhere and nowhere at once, passively leading a massive grassroots effort to challenge Chipotle with something it knows very little about: the truth. Any journalist looking for a perfect subject for a profile should seek him out.